by BJ Beauchamp
For 2008 I made the resolution to do things I hadn't done before. So first I volunteered for float making duty on the city of Anaheim’s entry in the 120th Rose Parade: “Crank Up the Entertainment” (#39). The “crank” in Anaheim’s title was because the float it was to be a music box with all the top ten tourist attractions in Anaheim depicted, including Angel Stadium, Garden Walk, the Grove, Honda Center and of course Disneyland. This year’s parade theme was “Hats Off to Entertainment.”
Instructions on the Anaheim web-site noted I would need to arrive a half-hour earlier than the 9 to 5 shift for general intelligence disbursement. I would need to bring a lunch as there were no services nearby, to wear warm clothing, to tie hair back and out of face, to wear a fanny pack instead of a purse. And there were to be no cameras, or iPods… well there it was, no music. Regardless of building a music box float or the parade’s theme, there would be no personal music. I thought, wistfully, maybe there might be music piped in overhead in the warehouse. Maybe even holiday music.
I arrived on time. I was the only one to arrive for the next 15 minutes. There were 60 people scheduled to work that day, but I was told some wouldn’t come because when they signed up earlier in the year the weather was warmer. The weather that day was so chilly I could see my breath.
They put me to work at a table cutting flowers – Sea-Lavender, also known as statice, ranging from shades of purple to pink. The statice is a very tiny flower that you generally would use in a floral bouquet as filler. It was important to cut the flower but not snip any green – don’t waste, but also don’t contaminate the flora. Then the blossoms are off to a blender, you know like the kind you find in your kitchen. Definitely wasn’t anything high tech to this part of making a float.
The only sounds to be heard were the voices of teenagers there fulfilling course requirements of community service for school. The kids picked working on floats as they thought it would be more fun than the other options (silly kids). Most of the teenagers had their work handed back to them. Too much waste. It was hard for them to work under such conditions, so you could hope this would inspire them to get an education and never have to work on an assembly line again. There was no humming, no singing like happy little elves. Just grumbling from disillusioned teens.
There were other non-teenage volunteers, mostly people who signed up via the Kiwanis Club. There was one guy who volunteers every year. This gentleman said his regular gig was with a local toy maker. I figured him for being an engineer of some sort and told him so. He asked how I came to that conclusion, and I told him it was how he went about sorting his statice and arranging his work area, very efficient and exact. He said if he told me his title, he’d have to kill me, but he did smile slyly when I said he must be happy the company recently won a major lawsuit against a former employee. It was at this point I let him do the rest of the talking and just kept on cutting the statice and began playing music in my head. I didn’t hum or whistle, but I’m sure I had a slight grin on my face. Aside from the normal holiday tunes in my noggin by Bing, Burl and Frank were some really good stuff, but don’t take my word for it check out Rocco Deluca & the Burden, and Pongamoosic:
MySpace:
http://www.myspace.com/roccodeluca
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=194512045
Web:
http://www.pongamoosic.com/music.html
http://www.roccodeluca.com/
You don’t realize how much you miss something until it is so glaringly absent. I will however say that music on an MP3 player or piped in overhead may have been too much a distraction with all the various floats and the numerous souls working on them. It was fairly important for people to pay attention and be able to hear a shout of “look out.”
As for Anaheim’s float detail, I was told that eventually 30 people did show up. Since good free labor is in short supply I now have a standing invitation to come back for more float decorating duty in December of 2009. I don’t know about doing statice detail again as my 2009 resolutions didn’t include repeats per se, but I am hoping this year will be filled with good music, and not just in my head.
